UnPreSchool

If you know you are going to be teaching your kids at home, start now! You will be amazed at how much knowledge they are able to absorb…they just need someone to point it out to them and research it with them.

Don’t worry about ‘how many words should a five year old know?’ kind of lists. Play. And learn while you’re at it!

When education is the same as playing, why wait?

It turns out the kids LOVE Lego skyscrapers. They play together, (or alone) for hours. They follow common sense Lego rules like if one kid builds and ‘claims’ something, the other kid can play with but not modify or break it. Or not to worry about things falling apart on their watch if they were trying to rebuild something, but to not break something ‘just because’

We knew she was ‘officially pregnant’ when she cried her eyes out seeing little Anakin leaving his mom in the desert…again…seriously, we had seen this several times already…)

Star Wars has always been a big part of my life (well, only if you include making a Star Wars reference whenever possible and owning and wearing too often an adult sized Star Wars costume) but the kids hadn’t really shown too much interest…no more than any of the other things they are in to – from every comic book hero to anything that’s in a ‘Flying Bag’ (blind bag)…or anything that they have seen on youtube.

In our introductory weekly episode, the three and five year old visited a skatepark, play-drew Greek Mythology, and they experienced a variety of cutting tools that so far only dad and mom have been using.

There are many ways kids can learn but fun is always better. Let them play; when you’ve shown them how fun knowledge can be, what’s stopping them?

We went to their first airshow! The were super excited about the first few planes that flew over, the Super Hornet (only during an upside-down fly-by), and the snowbirds…mostly when they drew the heart in the sky.

We’ve been to three different skate parks in our city so far. (London, Ontario) There looks to be siz or seven that we will be sure to check out. (they call Victoria Park one, but meh…it’s mostly just some concrete blocks and broken glass)

The kids just get there and play. Scooters, little bikes, and just running…we’ll be back often. Whatever risks the kids are comfortable with (or are almost comfortable with) are right there. Have you heard about Parkour? (Where people jump from building to building and do crazy flips and things off of structures). Skateparks offer a great introduction to

We didn’t even come here to run, we came to scooter. I had to ask them if they were ready to put their gear on and ride yet..before they tired themselves out!
During school hours, no one is there. Kids as young as brand new crawlers can have a blast here with so many slopes and angles and risk levels.

The whiteboard has had many letter games, tic tac toe games, and all sorts of pictures set up for them in the morning (which caused me to search youtube for ‘how to draw characters’. (I suck at it, but they don’t realize it yet!). It has little dots on it in a grid pattern which have many advantages down the unschooling road for sure.

Slacklining allows a person to quickly and consistently experience and work against a range of stresses and forces that our bodies are fighting against all the time…without the advantage of the ground’s stability! One of the reasons you don’t really pay attention to all these forces throughout your day is because the ground you are walking on or the chair you are sitting in is stable. The ground is pushing up on the chair with the same force you are pushing down on it…but on a slackline, what you are pushing down against is flexible. And wobbly.

It was probably a decade or two ago that I said ‘wow, I’m never going to a raspberry farm again!’ At that point in my life I had no kids to unschool.

This time when we were invited out to the raspberry farm (like those places where you go pick your own and they are like 40 mins away…each way? ugh!) I was about to tell them how completely uninterested in that I was, but as my lips were forming the word ‘nah’ I thought about unschooling in a raspberry field. Sure!